Researchers have developed a groundbreaking new lithium ion battery
that charges super quickly and lasts 10 times longer than today’s
batteries. It’ll be on the market within two years.


Sick of waiting an hour for your phone to charge before you leave the
house? Researchers at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore
have come up with the best solution yet - a lithium ion battery that
charges to 70 percent in just two minutes.
Even better, it also lasts for 20 years, and will reportedly be available
to the public within two years.
Rechargeable lithium ion batteries are already common in our mobile
phones, tablets and laptops - but most only last around 500 recharge
cycles, which is around two to three years of typical use. And at the
moment batteries take around two hours to fully charge.
The new battery drastically improves this process, and will allow you
to charge your phone while you look for your keys on the way out the
door. It would also help make electric vehicles a more viable
alternative to fossil-fuel-powered cars, by reducing battery
replacement costs and allowing drivers to recharge their cars in
minutes.
“Electric cars will be able to increase their range dramatically, with
just five minutes of charging, which is on par with the time needed to
pump petrol for current cars,” said Professor Chen Xiaodong who led
the study, in a press release . “Equally important, we can now
drastically cut down the toxic waste generated by disposed batteries,
since our batteries last 10 times longer than the current generation of
lithium-ion batteries.”
The breakthrough came after the scientists replaced the traditional
graphite that makes up the anode (the negative pole of the battery) in
lithium-ion batteries with a new gel material made from titanium
dioxide nanotubes that they created themselves.
These nanotubes are a thousand times thinner than a human hair, and
they speed up the rate at which electrons and ions can transfer in and
out of the batteries, allowing for super-fast charging. They also allow
more energy to be packed into the batteries. This means that the
battery can now offer 10,000 charging cycles, instead of the usual
500.
Even better, the new batteries will be relatively cheap, as titanium
dioxide is inexpensive and already readily available in soil. The team
has published details on how they formed the titanium dioxide gel in
Advanced Materials, and have already had the technology licensed to
eventually produce the devices. They expect they’ll be on the market
within two years.

I literarily can't wait